We’re so used to seeing her swathed in layers of period drama costumes, sitting on a hill somewhere looking all wistful and pretty, it’s hard to get our heads around this. The beautiful, elegant and ladylike Keira Knightley being spanked by Michael Fassbender? What?! How on earth did she handle such a prospect? With breathing exercises and thespian-techniques? Nope. By drinking copious amounts of booze, of course.
For the soon-to-be-released flick, A Dangerous Method, Keira has revealed she downed shots of vodka and glasses of champagne to give her the confidence she needed to handle the harsh spanking scenes featured in the film.
The brunette beauty told Culture magazine, “We had one or two shots maximum. It was a vodka shot to calm our nerves and away you go really. Then we had champagne. We drank quite a lot of champagne, actually. The vodka and the champagne was a good combination.”
Yikes. Needing a combo of voddy and champers to deal with the not-ugly-at-all Michael Fassbender smacking your bee-hind…
The film, which tells the story of the relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, sees our fave period drama heroine take on a very different role. The long frocks and corsets are still around but instead of pretty dancing scenes Knightley is seen being spanked with a leather belt whilst lying topless in bed. But don’t go thinking this is a sexy film, oh no!
"When I first read the script, I thought the script was fascinating, and it's David, and I really want to work with David, but I read those two scenes and just went, 'I don't think that I can do that,' particularly because it's the age of the Internet; it's gonna be everywhere; I don't want that out there. I phoned him up to really turn it down, I said to him, 'Look, I love you, I love the script, I love the character, but I really don't know that I can play those scenes.’ He said, ‘If I'm gonna do them, then they're gonna be clinical; they're not gonna be sexy, they're not gonna be voyeuristic in that way.' And I thought, 'Okay, well I can understand that. As long as it's clinical and it's not some, sort of, weird sexy spanking thing.'"
As long as it’s just a bit of clinical spanking, eh? Crikey…
Keira’s character Sabine is also often seen hysterical in the film, which Keira prepared for by sitting in her bathroom for a few hours pulling, faces at herself in the mirror. We usually do that every morning before work too!